Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Actually, even though you didn't RTF[SA], your comment was pretty much correct. The submitter was the only one who claimed it was the first discovery, period; the actual article only claimed it was the first discovery by Einstein@Home. Please take all of that massive guilt you now have and redirect towards the usual guilty parties, timothy and any submitter of an article he publishes... sigh.

The claim from TFMSNBCA is "The pulsar discovery, announced today on the journal Science's website, marks the first time Einstein @ Home has had a hit.". And later " The first and most famous BOINC project is SETI @ Home, which has been sifting through Arecibo data for the past 11 years, looking for signals from alien civilizations. (None has been found yet, even though more than 5 million users have been looking.)".

No idea how you combine those two into "The claim that this is the first discovery to be made through distributed computing".

Indeed, one might even go as far as to say F@H started the E@H project - being that F@H started about 5 years prior - so if F@H wasn't successful at all in 5 years, its unlikely that E@H would have even taken off.

It gets detected. Each work unit is processed by multiple clients. Given the number of computers involved it would be hard to fake a particular work unit because the likelihood of someone controlling the clients involved for that specific work unit is slim.

Truth be told I was just trying to make a joke about the constant argument, though I do feel there's a reason so many schools offer a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology degree, as well as Bachelor Science. The field just doesn't fit neatly anywhere...

SETI@home has discovered that they can get many people to use their personal computational power and electricity to process random signals in a vague hope of discovering intelligent life.

I'm surprised so many people believe there is intelligent life in the Universe.

You certainly wouldn't find any in the broadcast frequencies emanating from Earth. And if there were aliens who somehow picked up the radio signals coming from Earth, they would think that the United States is a dystopian tyranny governed by the

Excited: The first discovery based on a generic distributed computing infrastructure (BOINC)

Sad: Distributed computing is rather commonplace today, and plenty of people have access to scalable Hadoop clusters that can scale on demand.

Yes, BOINC allows people to use idle computing capacity. But if we need plenty of computing capacity today, it is not that hard to get it: It is much simpler to simply rent a few EC2 machines, or get a computing grant from Google/Y

Is it really sad that distributed computing is so commonplace that it's resulting in discoveries in fields as disperse as biochemistry, abstract mathematics, and astronomy? That sounds like... the opposite of sad. Something went from being new and exciting but small scale to massive and available to many, and now many more projects are able to exploit it. That sounds exciting to me.

Sure Foldit is more interesting and exciting from the technological development standpoint. Is this some kind of zero-sum game where that necessarily means it eats up the excitement points of discovering pulsars with "traditional" distributed computing projcets?

Though even his intended point I'd have to question... it's hard to call finding a Mersenne prime a real "scientific discovery". It's pretty purely mathematical, I'd think, as is any distributed algorithm that takes no input beyond the initial equations. Not that there haven't been actual discoveries - I just find the Mersenne prime search a pretty bad example.

Nothing in the abstract or the linked article makes any claims of being the first any discovery. All this is about is that this particular project had its first hit. The rest is just sensationalist nonsense from the summary writer.

Did some scanning... that 'first discovery' bit seems to be conflating physorg, universetoday and other press releases. In some they say first pulsar by distributed project (technically but just barely correct), in some they say first scientific discover by einstein@home (correct) and in some they say first astronomical discovery by einstein@home (also correct).

Somewhere along the line through sloppy editing this evolved to "first scientific discovery by a distributed project". Not a claim made by anybod

Jesus Christ, get a life, stop arguing about which distributed computing program discovered something first. If the summary was bad, then it was bad. You guys need to get out more and stop being dorks.

One of the things that wasn't talked much about in the press conference was that the software heavily utilizes the GPU over the CPU when compatible hardware exists. I meant to bring it up somehow, but I was happy to be done and off camera after an hour. Media events, while interesting, require a lot of sitting still, being quiet, and not sneezing.

Yes, the technology for doing distributed computing is now over ten years old and I was a very early adopter. So as some people pointed out that's not new 'news' anymore per say. What is computationally newer is that the projects now don't just expand at Moore's law's rate anymore and as GPUs get better it will increase much faster for the next few years until leveling off at some new growth rate. Yes I know other things have been found, but finding a pulsar was really cool. Speaking with the scientists and science media all over the world and seeing the full international scope of this project over the last few weeks was also fascinating.

. This is the first scientific discovery by a distributed computing project,

Checking all the links, it doesn't look like this claim is made anywhere. The MSNBC Cosmic Log article does say "The pulsar discovery... marks the first time Einstein @ Home has had a hit," but that's it.

Prior to this, I only knew of two distributed computing projects, SETI and DESCHALL. DESCHALL was an effort in the mid 90's to prove to the government that their Data Encryption Standard (DES) was not a secure encryption type, and it was successful in 1996. 14 years before this event.

I did forget that one. Lol. I was not in anyway trying to imply that DESCHALL was the first distributed computer discovery. It probably isn't, but it came before this pulsar project so there is no way the pulsar project is the first.:)

Back when throwing in my CPU cycles added a small to moderate increase to power consumption, I was happy to run these clients. But, the last time I checked, my gaming rig's power draw nearly tripled going from as low as I could get it (drives spun down, video idle, CPU clocked way down, etc.) to having all 4 cores and both graphics cards maxed. Nevermind the heat that comes pouring out and the noise when all the fans ramp up. It's not like the old days when loading up your Pentium 3 added an extra 20 wa

The fight cancer at home project seems pretty worthwhile to me. And there are more projects on biochemistry, that your computer can help with. Think of the higher electricity bill as a donation to science, because that's what it is. And you're not making a donation to a foundation that's lobbying for bigger funds from the state, you're actually paying for direct work in a certain field. The ability of the population to control how money is spent on research is pretty much maximized with the @home model.Also

The couple read about E@h on Slashdot and then they installed it on their computers too.
Also, if you watch the press conference (available online) they DO claim this is the first discovery for volunteer computing.